The Note: Ich Bin Ein Obama

July 24, 2008 -- There may be no greater opportunity for Obama to show (and need to show) he loves his country than when the throngs greet him in Berlin Thursday.

(That's partly because his fellow American can watch a million Germans march every night on the History Channel -- and we all know how that film ends.)

And as Obama soaks up the love, he needs his country to love him back.

For as well as it's been going, we don't know how this visit ends -- how an anti-war, anti-administration candidate can deliver a foreign-policy address abroad and not seem anti-American; how hundreds of thousands of Europeans can cheer a presidential candidate and not scare swing-state voters; how the Obama shtick plays with a foreign backdrop; how a candidate who is just plain different fills the JFK-Reagan slot in Berlin.

Even Obama knows the risk (as disguised by spin): "I doubt we're gonna have a million screaming Germans," he told reporters on board his plane early Thursday, per ABC's Jake Tapper. "It's a potentially bad thing if nobody shows up. . . . It's sort of a crap shoot."

People will show up. "Hopefully it will be viewed as a substantive articulation of the relationship I'd like to see between the US and Europe," Obama said. (Excited yet?)

But that's not really his entire hope: The truth is, as much as he's winning the imagery wars, Obama needs the visuals.

And the country needs a certain comfort level it hasn't found to date: "Midway through the election year, the presidential campaign looks less like a race between two candidates than a referendum on one of them -- Sen. Barack Obama," Gerald F. Seib and Laura Meckler write in The Wall Street Journal.

The headline from the new WSJ/NBC poll, which has it Obama 47, McCain 41 (same as a month ago): "Fully half of all voters say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. Obama would be as they decide how they will vote, while only a quarter say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. McCain would be," Seib and Meckler write.

We know still that things aren't happy in Sen. John McCain's world -- even the weather won't cooperate with his counter-programming plans. This time it's Hurricane Dolly blowing his message off-course: That visit to an offshore rig, the big Thursday event his campaign had planned to push its main domestic message, is out. (Did Mother Nature just endorse a candidate?)

"Through a series of missteps, gaffes and bad luck, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has endured a difficult week in what has been a choppy campaign," Michael Shear writes in The Washington Post. "He now has no major event to offset Sen. Barack Obama's speech at Berlin's famed Victory Column, where a huge turnout is expected. Instead, he will be in Columbus, Ohio, speaking at a nighttime cancer event."

There's Dolly, and "worse than that, an oil spill closed 29 miles of the Mississippi River," ABC's David Wright reported Thursday on "Good Morning America." "Not exactly the best visual for McCain to make the case that America needs to drill more oil wells."

"I can hardly believe how badly John McCain is getting routed in the television-imagery game," writes The New Republic's Michael Crowley.

It's not just symbolism, either: McCain just might have lost something very big while Obama was handling his baggage.

"You could see McCain's frustration building as Barack Obama traipsed elegantly through the Middle East while the pillars of McCain's bellicose regional policy crumbled in his wake," Time's Joe Klein writes. "McCain's greatest claim to the presidency -- his overseas expertise -- now seems squandered."

"Obama has pulled it off in great style and thereby enhanced his credentials for the Oval Office," David Broder writes in his column. "The ground has shifted [under McCain] -- and his opponent was right where he needed to be to capture the advantage. July has been a cruel month for McCain."

"It is Obama, not McCain, who is the master of his own destiny," Stuart Rothenberg writes for Roll Call. "It's up to him to make those undecided voters comfortable with who he is and what kind of president -- what kind of commander in chief -- he would be. If he succeeds in doing so over the next three months, he is likely to win the White House."

How's this for a world stage? "Sen. Barack Obama's campaign will be among the TV sponsors of NBC Universal's Olympics coverage," Ira Teinowitz reports for Advertising Age. "In the first significant network-TV buy of any presidential candidate in at least 16 years, the Obama campaign has taken a $5 million package of Olympics spots that includes network TV as well as cable ads."

(McCain will be talking cancer with Lance Armstrong on Thursday -- not a bad event for most any other day. But can/will/would/should the McCain campaign pull off a bigger surprise to trump Obama's big day -- or is the week already lost?)

They're a-buzz in Berlin for Obama: "Walking around Berlin recently, the American visitor could be forgiven for thinking Germany was the 51st state in the Union -- and that it would vote heavily for Senator Barack Obama on November 4," Time's Stephanie Kirchner writes. "The question now is whether Obama will be able to meet the sky-high expectations."

"Obama's campaign has been pulling out all the stops, distributing these fliers in German to round up a huge crowd for his speech tonight," ABC's Jake Tapper reported on "GMA," "one the Obama campaign is billing as almost presidential -- even though he is not the president. . . . Everything about this trip is meticulously designed to make you comfortable with Obama as commander-in-chief."

Per the AP scene-setter: "A column of black BMW and Mercedes-Benz cars ferried the candidate to a private meeting with [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel that lasted about an hour. Overhead, a police helicopter kept watch. Some 700 police have been deployed during the visit, which lasts through Friday morning."

The audiences are varied: "Europeans view Barack Obama's massive speech here as a symbol of a potential new direction for international relations and cheer him as a rejection of President Bush, but the leaders he will meet when his Western Europe trip begins Thursday may have more in common with his political rival," Christina Bellantoni writes from Berlin for the Washington Times.